Athol Shmith: My father in the frame

Michael Shmith

PRECEDE: The 100th birthday of the late great Melbourne photographer Athol Shmith falls in August. Michael Shmith revisits his father’s memorable body of work.

QUOTE: The surviving prints reposed in and on top of cupboards, under furniture, in drawers, on shelves and on Athol’s desk.

Self -portrait 1984 Photo: Estate of Athol Shmith

STORY: SOMEHOW, he always seemed much older than he really was. That’s usually the case with a parent. You’re not supposed to believe your father had ever been your age, any more than you can summon the courage to imagine fathers and mothers playing mothers and fathers. Parents just didn’t do those things. So the thought that Athol Shmith would be turning 100 on August 19th is faintly ludicrous, but, alas, wholly credible.

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I wish he were here to celebrate, but Athol made his exit from this world more than two decades ago, at the age of 77. Mind you, the ravages of emphysema had turned him into a stooped and fragile old man who could have been a youthful-looking centenarian.

He was on permanent oxygen, but still lived at home, in his South Yarra flat, still making coffee, still putting the heater up to Sahara temperature (no cigarettes, by then), and still negotiating the treacherous narrowness of the spiral stairs, made even more challenging by the gently hissing trailing oxygen leads threaded through the railings like transparent snakes.

Patricia Shmith at the beach 1950s Photo: Estate of Athol Shmith

In that flat, after Athol’s death, in addition to the detritus that he could never bring himself to throw away – ancient shopping lists, piles of magazines, even a vaccination certificate for the long-deceased hound that Athol used to take for drives instead of walks, the intense temperature in the car matching that of the flat – was his life’s work.

What was there was an incomparable collection of around 500 prints that ranged from the early 1930s, when Athol was starting out from a small first-floor studio in Fitzroy Street, St Kilda, to his Indian-summer achievements of the late 1980s: mostly portraits of those who interested him, or the very occasional wedding.

They were stored everywhere in his small and dark South Yarra cave that still bore the faint aromas of long-gone tobacco, stale black coffee and his particular brand of after-shave. The surviving prints reposed in and on top of cupboards, under furniture, in drawers, on shelves and on Athol’s desk. Why so precious? Mainly because they were all his work – the work he obviously loved and felt he should store – but more because they were the only definitive works left.

Athol never kept his negatives. This, being retold in the age of fathomless digital storage, seems incredible; but it was true. His studio at 125 Collins Street was not that large to contain the swelling archives of commercial work, portraiture and the multitude of weddings that kept Athol busy every Saturday.

So every now and then, out went boxes and boxes of negatives to make way for new ones which, in turn, yielded to fresher ones, and so on. So what was in that flat – that relatively small representation of, say, 60 years of ceaseless, varied and astonishingly brilliant output – was my father’s own tribute to the quite different minimal oeuvre of Johannes Vermeer. Quality, to be sure, but of such a rareness to make one long for the discovery of a cache of photographs hitherto unexplored.

Never mind. What was there was enough to pose a question: What to do with it? I flirted with the idea of selling items from the collection, piece by piece; but how could you break up something as priceless as Athol Shmith’s surviving photographs?

So, early in 1991, I had lunch with then NGV director James Mollison. By the time we got to coffee, I slid across the table an envelope. It contained a list of all the photographs in the collection. “Would you like to have these?” I asked him. His look of astonishment, followed very quickly by a look of gratitude, answered my question.

Twenty-three years on, I have never regretted for a second the handing over of those pictures to the custodianship of the state. The NGV photography department has cared for them immaculately, and what pleases me more is that this is exactly where Athol would have wanted them to be.

In the late 1960s, soon after the gallery moved into its St Kilda Rd premises, he was instrumental in setting up the department of photography; and, in 1989, he was given a retrospective at the gallery that brought him much joy and, indeed, consolidated his reputation as one of the great old masters of the art form.

In writing this article, I thought I’d better check on the collection. So early in May, feeling rather like a prison visitor, I made an appointment with the photography department to see the 500 surviving inmates. This is what happened.

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It’s been a while between visits. The last time, the photography department was in a different part of the NGV St Kilda Road building, with its archives elsewhere. Now the whole lot is handsomely together. There, arranged in neat horizontal stacks on the archive shelves, are the series of long and shallow black boxes containing my father’s works, with Athol Shmith labels on the facing edge. Nearby, the work of distinguished cellmates Wolfgang Sievers and Alfred Stieglitz make their own marks.

But it’s Athol’s work I’ve come to see. In an adjoining room, the boxes are brought in and laid out on a large, wide table. The first box, as it happens, contains not works by him, but of him. Various portraits, snapshots and ephemera of my father in front of rather than behind a series of lenses of different periods.

That face, with its defined angles and leanness, large dark eyes, spectacles sitting on that pronounced nose, is therefore the first thing I see – and how little it changes over the years. The peaks and troughs of ageing may take their forms, but the essential person is much the same (as are the specs) from youth to seniority. Likewise, the stripey shirts, the Windsor-knotted ties, the navy reefer jackets.

I didn’t forget the omnipresent cigarette (Athol’s equivalent of the eternal flame), smouldering to extinction between the index and first fingers of his right hand. It’s there, in multiple strengths and myriad brands, in almost every photograph. But Photoshop it out, you may as well remove his spectacles as well and be done with it.

Other boxes bring a succession of fresh delights and old favourites. Most of Athol’s three wives are there – as are several lovers, but this is not the time for sensationalism. His wives were all, at one stage or another, fashion models. His first, Yvonne Slater; his second, my mother Patricia Tuckwell; and his third, Paule (Monique) Paulus, a Dior model who came to Australia in 1948 and stayed on.

Of this trinity, only my mother survives – and she is hale and hearty in her late 80s. Strangely, she is still known in this country by her sobriquet, Bambi. In England, where she has lived since the late 1950s, Bambi is an animated buck, courtesy of Walt Disney’s animation department.

I was at my father’s third wedding, to Paule, three days before my 18th birthday on July 4, 1967, but quite naturally missed the previous two. But I do feel I was almost there for his wedding to my mother, on July 7, 1948, especially since I was born one year later to the day. Besides, the photographs Athol took of my mother on that day – rushing her up Collins Street from the Australia Hotel to his studio – have engraved themselves on my mind: I scarcely needed reminding of their beauteous and numinous qualities.

What I discover from the other boxes are the other weddings: many of them. There was a time when no grand piano in this town was complete without a range of Athol’s wedding photography along the top. For he was as much a society photographer (this at a time when Melbourne actually had one) as he was a fashion-and-whatever one.

I am also proudly shown a recent bequest from Mary Lipshut, the extraordinary Melbourne fashion collector and benefactor who died in February, whose 1945 wedding was photographed by Athol. Here, hand-coloured by those beady-eyed, exact women who applied their brush-stroke magic in Room 7 at Athol’s studio, is a wedding I could never have seen, and have, in fact, not seen until this moment. The really glorious picture is of Mary with her twin sister, both seated pertly on an ornate rug, staring wistfully at the camera. It is similarly haunting as one of my mother’s own wedding pictures.

(As coincidence would have it, three nights later, I am at a party at Rae Rothfield’s apartment. Rae, a long-time patron of the NGV, is an old friend of my father’s. She used to let him use her Toorak mansion for location shooting (mostly for luxury cars) in return for his taking photographs of her children. Her twin sister was Mary Lipshut. What was it like, being photographed by Athol? “He didn’t have to work hard. Whatever he said we went along with it,” says Rae.)

Many weddings, to be sure, but also many forms of photography are in Athol’s legacy. The word “celebrity” was not around much when he was working, but they exist in abundance in those boxes. “Who’s that?” I am asked, as we unearth another hand-coloured photograph of who could be a Toorak debutante standing by a fireplace. “Vivien Leigh”, says the label, as Camille, taken in 1961. “And who’s that thoughtful man?”, well-creased with age, finger under chin. “Arthur Koestler”.

Others fall into view, like large playing cards: Isaac Stern, Stradivari tucked under his chin; Bernard Heinze, music cascading in the background; Elizabeth Taylor, in Melbourne for the premiere of Around the World in 80 Days, with her then husband, Mike Todd; and the skeletal, bug-eyed Robert Helpmann, wary but ominously talented.

On we go, box after box. Actually, there are more to see, but this is enough in order to gain knowledge and regain my filial admiration for someone who was not only a parent but an artistic genius. The nice thing about being a prison visitor, is you can go as often as you like.

In the almost quarter-century since my father’s death, the landscape of photography has changed astonishingly. Athol, after all, would have thought “photoshop” was somewhere you bought film – and even that term is fading fast from the lexicon.

His talent, which I often saw at first-hand while he worked in the darkroom, was to combine subject, light, shade, mood and period into a single image. But an image that was one of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands. The mosaic that is my Athol Shmith’s legacy is profound and brilliant. The one that was my father is a more complicated and less easily discernible arrangement. I miss him, though. He once – and once only – gave me a photography lesson. I don’t remember anything about it.

What has happened is that Athol’s grandson Sam, my son, is a photographer who is, in my viewfinder, of comparable insight and skill. One of Sam’s works is already in the NVG collection. The gene might have skipped a generation, but how wonderful it is that it has been continued. My father would have been happy. He also would have been proud.

Michael Shmith is a former Fairfax journalist. He is a life member of the NGV. This article was first published in the NGV magazine.